What I've Learned in Tokyo: My Experiences

The Inspiration

When I first visited Tokyo in the nineties, it felt like the future. I started living there in the noughties, and it felt like the present. These days, it greets me like a gentle old friend. The best Tokyo has to offer now tends to be retro: the old districts, the suburbs, the amazing vintage shopping. The fact that the exchange rate is currently making everything so cheap for tourists only adds to the sense of nostalgia.

The People

Tokyoites are kind, considerate, welcoming, and refined. Things run so smoothly that you can easily forget you’re in the middle of the world’s largest urban agglomeration, cheek by jowl with 37 million people. The enormous influx of tourists may have eroded some of Tokyo’s essential difference, but a kind Tokyoite will still walk you to a destination you can’t find, or lend you a transparent umbrella when it rains.

The Transportation

Trips in Tokyo are four times as likely to be made with public transport, walking, or bicycle than by private car, which makes the city’s streets the least snarled and the most pleasant I know. The city is vast but relatively flat; if do you choose to see it by bike, you’ll always find empty backstreets with their own charm, perhaps curving along an unseen river. Even the supposedly boring areas turn out to have hidden treasures: a park featuring a collection of thatched farmhouses, a hilltop temple, a shopping street bisected by a local railway line.

The Suburbs

Of course, I’m always interested to check out the latest high-end shopping centers in Tokyo’s multiple, competing, scattered centers (Aoyama, Shibuya, Ginza, or Roppongi). But the more time I spend in the city the more I gravitate to its neglected suburbs. In Jujo, for instance, a small Bangladeshi community runs multiple shops in the shotengai and there’s a local kabuki theatre. In the southern part of Setagaya, there are fresh book and record shops capable of evoking the heady days when Harajuku was still a genuine countercultural hub.

The Craft

Without summoning the old cliché of the geisha with the cellphone, we can say that craft in Japan takes both modern and ancient forms, and that they’re often connected. There’s craft in the yakimono pottery on display at the Mingei Museum, of course, but also in Kengo Kuma’s Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center, a small skyscraper constructed of wood columns and multi-slanted rooflines. What connects the two is the deep and abiding Japanese respect for craftspeople, those “living national treasures” transmitting an intangible sense of cultural heritage via tangible objects.

The Religion

Something worth keeping in mind on any trip to Japan is that Shinto – the Indigenous folk religion tied to rituals of cleanliness, fertility, and the seasons – is a form of animism. So everything, every object, is seen as having a soul of some kind, and being worthy of deep respect. Divinity is scattered through the ordinary life of everyday, and even humdrum tasks are imbued with a sense of the sacred. A person might be sweeping an already clean floor with a whisk, or a train might be entering a station accompanied by a tinkling piece of music, specially composed. On one level what’s happening is pragmatic and banal. But these actions are also gestures of devotion to unseen divinities and the generous cycles of nature itself. I came up with a word to describe the result: “superlegitimacy.” It’s impossible to spend any time in a Japanese city without feeling this respect manifest itself, often in surprising ways. And it’s impossible to leave the enchanted archipelago without bringing a little “superlegitimacy” home.

For Friends

I would meet them at the new Blue Bottle Coffee café in Daikanyama, then take them down to the blossoming (or lightbulb popping, depending on the season) banks of the Meguro River, where the chic boutiques remind me somehow of Utrecht or Amsterdam. Alternatively, we can meet in Ueno Park and take a walk through the Yanaka district from there. We enjoy an ice cream while lying on tatami mats at Kabaya Coffee. We’ll then linger at SCAI The Bathhouse, an art gallery in a converted bathhouse. Finally, we’d look for cheap kimonos at Yanaka Ginza, a charming nearby shopping area that’s full of retro energy.

About:

Japan again and again: Scottish musician and producer Nicholas Currie, aka Momus, spent a lot of time there in the 1990s, working with popular pop musicians such as Kahimi Karie and Cornelius. He lived in Tokyo for two years in the early 2000s and in Osaka for eight years in the 2010s. He now divides his time between Paris and Berlin, but returns to Tokyo regularly. Momus has released about 40 records, his new album is called “Ballyhoo.”